Is there a way to insert activities into a feed so they appear as if they were inserted at a specific time in the past? I had assumed that when adding items to a feed it would use the 'time' value to sort the results, even when propagated to other feeds following the initial feed, but it seems that's not the case and they just get sorted by the order they were added to the feed.
I'm working on a timeline view for our users, and I have a couple of reasons for wanting to insert activities at previous points in time:
1) We have a large number of entities in our database but a relatively small number of them will be followed (especially at first), so to be more efficient I had planned to only add activities for an entity once it had at least one follower. Once somebody follows it I would like to go back 14 days and insert activities for that entity as if they were created at the time they occurred, so the new follower would see them in their feed at the appropriate place. Currently they will just see a huge group of activities from the past at the top of their feed which is not useful.
2) Similarly, we already have certain following relationships within our database and at launch I would like to go back a certain amount of time and insert activities for all entities that already have followers so that the feed is immediately useful.
Is there any way to do this, or am I out of luck?
My feeds are a combination of flat and aggregated feeds - the main timeline for a user is aggregated, but most entity feeds are flat. All of my aggregation groups would be based on the time of the activity so ideally there would be a way to sort the final aggregation groups by time as well.
